All news with #secrets management tag

Addressing Password Management Challenges to Protect Data

🔒 Enterprises and SMBs have invested heavily in authentication and IAM, but those controls are only as strong as password management. Compromised credentials remain a leading cause of breaches while the average employee manages over 100 accounts, creating operational and compliance burdens. Dedicated password managers can cut support costs by up to 80% and lower incident rates, but success requires strong user adoption and integration with SSO, MFA, LDAP/AD and privileged access systems.

Password managers under attack: risks, examples, defenses

🔐 Password managers centralize credentials but are attractive targets for attackers who exploit phishing, malware, vendor breaches, fake apps and software vulnerabilities. Recent incidents — including a 2022 LastPass compromise and an ESET‑reported North Korean campaign — demonstrate how adversaries can exfiltrate vault data or trick users into surrendering master passwords. To reduce risk, use a long unique master passphrase, enable 2FA, keep software and browsers updated, install reputable endpoint security, and only download official apps from trusted stores.

Rethinking Identity Security for Autonomous AI Agents

🔐 Autonomous AI agents are creating a new class of non-human identities that traditional, human-centric security models struggle to govern. These agents can persist beyond intended lifecycles, hold excessive permissions, and perform actions across systems without clear ownership, increasing risks like privilege escalation and large-scale data exfiltration. Security teams must adopt identity-first controls—unique managed identities, strict scoping, lifecycle management, and continuous auditing—to regain visibility and enforce least privilege.

Privileged Account Monitoring and Protection Guide Overview

🔐 This article outlines Mandiant's practical framework for securing privileged access across modern enterprise and cloud environments. It emphasizes a three-pillar approach—Prevention, Detection, and Response—and details controls such as PAM, PAWs, JIT/JEA, MFA, secrets rotation, and tiered access. The post highlights detection engineering, high-fidelity session capture, and SOAR automation to reduce dwell time and blast radius, and concludes with incident response guidance including enterprise password rotations and protected recovery paths.

Top IAM Vendors for Zero Trust and Identity Security

🔑 Identity is becoming the new perimeter as organizations accelerate the move to Zero Trust, making robust Identity & Access Management essential for secure access and continuity. This roundup examines leading IAM vendors and highlights capabilities in IGA, PAM, IDaaS, CIEM and risk-based authentication. Profiles cover strengths, pricing and integration trade-offs for vendors including CyberArk, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, SailPoint, Avatier and BeyondTrust to help CISOs match products to requirements.

Practical Guide to Google Cloud Parameter Manager Overview

🔒 Google Cloud's Parameter Manager centralizes application configuration to avoid hard-coded credentials and fragile config files, supporting validated JSON and YAML payloads as well as arbitrary unformatted data. It integrates with Secret Manager using a __REF__ syntax to keep confidential values separate and uses versioned, immutable parameter versions to prevent accidental changes. The post walks through storing an API key in Secret Manager, granting the Parameter Manager IAM principal access, and calling renderParameterVersion from a Node backend. A sample React/Node weather app demonstrates runtime configuration, fallback dummy data, and advanced patterns such as regional parameters and feature rollouts.

AWS PCS Adds Slurm Cluster Secret Rotation Support

🔐 AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) now supports rotation of Slurm cluster secret keys using AWS Secrets Manager. Administrators can update the credentials used for authentication between the Slurm controller and compute nodes without recreating a cluster, preserving running workloads and configuration. Regular rotation reduces the risk of credential compromise and helps meet security best practices and compliance requirements. The capability is available in all Regions where PCS operates and can be initiated from the Secrets Manager console or via API after preparing the cluster for rotation.

Deploying AWS Secrets Manager Agent as an EKS Sidecar

🔒 This post demonstrates deploying the AWS Secrets Manager Agent as a sidecar container in Amazon EKS to provide a language-agnostic local HTTP interface (localhost:2773) for secrets retrieval. The agent pulls and caches secret values, reducing direct API calls to Secrets Manager and improving application availability. It enforces SSRF protection via a generated token at /var/run/awssmatoken and implements ML‑KEM post‑quantum key exchange by default. Authentication uses Amazon EKS Pod Identity and IAM permissions (secretsmanager:GetSecretValue and secretsmanager:DescribeSecret), and the post includes build, containerization, and deployment steps.

Dull but Dangerous: 15 Overlooked Cybersecurity Gaps

🔒 This article catalogs 15 frequently overlooked security blind spots that quietly increase organizational risk across six domains: time & telemetry, identity & edge, configuration & crypto, DNS & web trust, cloud & SaaS sprawl, and software supply chain & recovery readiness. It explains how mundane issues — NTP drift, orphaned DNS records, default IoT credentials, stale backups — become high-impact failures. The piece recommends immediate inventories, enforced baselines and a 90-day action plan to measure and close these gaps, and highlights metrics to track such as log coverage, patching cadence and backup restore success.

Passwork 7: Unified On-Premises Password and Secrets

🔐 Passwork 7 is an on‑premises unified platform that consolidates password and secrets management with a redesigned interface and reworked core workflows to improve usability and security. The update introduces hierarchical vaults, custom vault types, role‑based access, and comprehensive logging, plus API, Python connector, CLI and Docker support for DevOps automation. Built on a zero‑knowledge AES‑256 model with MongoDB storage and ISO 27001 certification, it targets organizations needing centralized, compliant credential control.

Defending Against Credential Attacks with Hybrid Mesh

🔐 Credential-based attacks are at epidemic levels: the 2025 Verizon DBIR shows 22% of breaches begin with compromised credentials, and Check Point's External Risk Management saw leaked credential volumes rise 160% year‑over‑year. Attackers increasingly prefer to "log in" rather than "hack in," exploiting exposed passwords, tokens, API keys and OAuth abuse. The article recommends a hybrid mesh architecture that unifies identity, network, endpoint and cloud telemetry to apply context-aware, adaptive access controls, improved credential hygiene, and faster detection and response.

AI Coding Assistants Elevate Deep Security Risks Now

⚠️ Research and expert interviews indicate that AI coding assistants cut trivial syntax errors but increase more costly architectural and privilege-related flaws. Apiiro found AI-generated code produced fewer shallow bugs yet more misconfigurations, exposed secrets, and larger multi-file pull requests that overwhelm reviewers. Experts urge preserving human judgment, adding integrated security tooling, strict review policies, and traceability for AI outputs to avoid automating risk at scale.

SaaS-to-SaaS Proxy: Centralized Visibility and Control

🌐Cloudflare is prototyping a SaaS-to-SaaS proxy that consolidates SaaS connections through a single front door to improve monitoring, detection, and response. Two deployment models are proposed: a customer-controlled vanity hostname proxy that returns visibility to data owners, and a vendor-side reverse proxy that strengthens platform security. Both approaches use key splitting to avoid persisting full bearer tokens and enable instant revocation. Cloudflare is seeking feedback and offering early access.

Regaining Control of AI Agents and Non-Human Identities

🔐 Enterprises are struggling to secure thousands of non-human identities—service accounts, API tokens, and increasingly autonomous AI agents—that proliferate across cloud and CI/CD environments without clear ownership. These NHIs often use long-lived credentials, lack contextual signals for adaptive controls, and become over-permissioned or orphaned, creating major lateral-movement and compliance risks. The article recommends an identity security fabric—including discovery, risk-based privilege management, automated lifecycle policies, and integrations such as Okta with AWS—to regain visibility and enforce least-privilege at scale.

Shai-Hulud Worm: Large npm Supply Chain Compromise

🪱 Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is investigating an active supply chain attack in the npm ecosystem driven by a novel self-replicating worm tracked as "Shai-Hulud." The malware has compromised more than 180 packages, including high-impact libraries such as @ctrl/tinycolor, and automates credential theft, repository creation, and propagation across maintainers' packages. Unit 42 assesses with moderate confidence that an LLM assisted in authoring the malicious bash payload. Customers are protected through Cortex Cloud, Prisma Cloud, Cortex XDR and Advanced WildFire, and Unit 42 recommends immediate credential rotation, dependency audits, and enforcement of MFA.

Securing the Agentic Era: Astrix's Agent Control Plane

🔒 Astrix introduces the industry's first Agent Control Plane (ACP) to enable secure-by-design deployment of autonomous AI agents across the enterprise. ACP issues short-lived, precisely scoped credentials and enforces just-in-time, least-privilege access while centralizing inventory and activity trails. The platform streamlines policy-driven approvals for developers, speeds audits for security teams, and reduces compliance and operational risk by discovering non-human identities (NHIs) and remediating excessive privileges in real time.

Token Management Risks in the Third-Party Supply Chain

🔐 This Unit 42 report describes how compromised OAuth tokens in third‑party integrations create severe supply‑chain exposure, using recent incidents as examples. It highlights three recurring weaknesses: dormant integrations, insecure token storage and long‑lived credentials, and explains how attackers exploit these to exfiltrate data and pivot. The authors recommend token posture management, encrypted secret storage and centralized runtime monitoring to detect and revoke abused tokens quickly.

Cursor autorun flaw lets repos execute arbitrary code

🔓 Oasis Security disclosed a flaw in Cursor that allows malicious repositories to execute code when a developer opens a folder. The vulnerability stems from Workspace Trust being disabled by default, permitting crafted .vscode/tasks.json entries set to run on folder open to autorun without prompting. Successful exploitation can expose API keys, cloud credentials and local secrets, risking organization-wide compromise.

Cloudflare AI Gateway updates: unified billing, routing

🤖 Cloudflare’s AI Gateway refresh centralizes AI traffic management, offering unified billing, secure key storage, dynamic routing, and built-in security through a single endpoint. The update integrates Cloudflare Secrets Store for AES-encrypted BYO keys, provides an automatic normalization layer for requests/responses across providers, and introduces dashboard-driven Dynamic Routes for traffic splits, chaining, and limits. Native Firewall DLP scanning and configurable profiles add data protection controls, while partner access to 350+ models across six providers and a credits-based billing beta simplify procurement and cost management.

ISP Exposes Administrative Credentials via S3 Misconfig

🔓On October 11, 2018 UpGuard discovered that an Amazon S3 bucket named "pinapp2" exposed 73 GB of data belonging to Pocket iNet. The downloadable "tech" folder contained plaintext administrative passwords, AWS secret keys, network configuration files, inventory lists, and photographs of hardware and towers. Pocket iNet was notified the same day and secured the exposure on October 19, 2018. The incident highlights how misconfigured S3 ACLs and poor credential hygiene can place critical infrastructure at risk.